Knowledge is virtue essay

The father need only educate his children well, and he will be guaranteed virtuous progeny. It was external social corruption—not an internal state of rebellion—that was holding man back from his full potential.

I know that I was motivated to pursue a career in education by the promise that I could use my gifts to help draw students up to higher levels of understanding and, by so doing, empower them to live lives of greater purpose and virtue. This gives it the rationale and justification for eliminating that external evil—whether it considers that evil to reside in a social class the aristocracy or bourgeoisiean economic group kulaks or bankersa political group communists or fascistsor an ethnic group the Jews or Armenians.

Liberals, on the other hand, nurtured a very different vision of government as an engine for the reforming and reshaping of man and society. Each state, in its own way, believes that man can be reprogrammed and reshaped into a newer and better humanity; Knowledge is virtue essay feels that it can, and therefore should, build a utopia on earth.

It will only be a matter of time Knowledge is virtue essay knowledge takes the place of Truth, and Truth becomes defined as that kind of knowledge which promotes what the state believes to be virtue namely, liberty, equality, and fraternity. Can there be any nobler goal than that of eradicating ignorance?

After a while, the state will come truly to believe that only when all are the same will all be truly free. How wonderful it would be if these assertions were true. Here is how the same scenario plays out in more democratic states.

If the state and its agents succeed in this double liquidation, then they will be especially careful that those who remain are all educated in the same way, lest new evils spring up and demand a renewed purge of undesirable elements. The state begins by positing, as both Plato and Rousseau do in slightly different ways, that evil lies outside the individual, rather than within.

In both states, there is a reduction, a diminution of the true human spirit of diversity and creativity. Rousseau, though he would have disagreed with Plato in most other areas, agreed wholeheartedly that ignorance was the cause of most evil and that education was therefore the key to reforming the world.

Although the more elitist Socrates begins the dialogue by asserting that virtue cannot be taught, as the dialogue proceeds, he slowly adopts a position concerning the nature of virtue that drives him—almost against his will—toward the necessary conclusion that virtue can be taught.

In the one, secret police, paid informers, and brainwashing are used to bring about conformity; in the other, political correctness, media saturation, and multiculturalism are the less violent—though often more effective—tools of choice. He even has Socrates debate with Protagoras—on fairly equal terms!

Man is born free, he cried out in the famous opening sentence of The Social Contract, but is everywhere in chains. Later in the dialogue, Socrates explains more clearly what the cause is of this involuntary evil: It is only by throwing off the chains of convention and false hierarchy that man can return to his original state of purity: In Protagoras, however, Plato treats the sophist of the title with considerable respect.

For Rousseau, man in his natural state was both free and innocent. So the state feels justified in eliminating them as well for the promise that those who remain can be reeducated into pure and perfect citizens is so tantalizing that it alleviates the consciences of those the state appoints to neutralize the threat.

But then, I also knew that this promise was as exciting as it was illusory—that a man with a sixth grade education can be a saint, while a PhD can be both self-centered and immoral. Once it has eliminated the identified group, however, the state—which by now has come to identify itself with God or history or both—finds that there are still a large number of people within society who have been so corrupted by the evil elements that they are themselves a part of the external threat.

Here is how it happens in totalitarian states. Louis Markos 10 Plato never cared much for the sophists, viewing them as amoral peddlers of a relativistic kind of wisdom with the potential to corrupt the souls of those who hired them. Beginning with the belief that knowledge is virtue, the state will filter this belief through its devotion to liberty, equality, and fraternity so as to come up with three corollaries:Virtue is an activity of the human soul and has two parts virtue of character and virtue of intellect.

Virtue of intellect is wisdom and knowledge an example would be studying at school. Virtue of character is learned by action and practice an example would be learning that cheating on tests is. Knowledge, ultimately, is an understanding of the cause and effect relationships that govern our lives, the nature and role of each entity in relation to all.

Knowledge allows us to describe, affect and predict the natural world. A virtue must be cultivated for it to become a habitual way of living in the world around us.

For each of us, there is a core set of virtues or principles that serves our life mission. When we violate these, we violate ourselves. In this paper, I will exam Plato’s idea of “virtue is knowledge” to understand “can virtue be taught”.

In my opinion, Plato does not strictly proves “virtue is knowledge”; instead, he believes that “virtue.

Free Essay: The philosopher, Linda Zagzebski, offers a virtue based definition of knowledge. She arrives at this definition by presenting numerous accounts.

We define knowledge as the state or fact of knowing, familiarity, awareness or understanding, gained through experience or study and virtue as the moral excellence and righteousness. All of us have knowledge but not all the knowledge we have is the same, same with virtue.